1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to digital mobile communication systems, and in particular, to a method for entering an address of a desired Internet website into a mobile communication terminal for wireless accessing Internet data networks using the terminal's keypad.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile communication systems generally refer to different telecommunication systems for providing personal wireless data transmission to subscribers who roam the system area. In addition to conventional speech transmission, the digital mobile communication systems provide a diversity of other services: short message services, facsimiles, data transmission, etc. Of these, the data transmission service particularly provides the mobile subscriber with a choice of wirelessly accessing almost all data services of fixed networks. Use of the Internet data network in fixed networks is increasing very rapidly. In the meantime, the communication environment in state of the art communications system is changing very rapidly in both fields of wireless and wired communication systems over international networks as well as in local networks. In particular, the third generation mobile communications system, e.g., such as IMT-2000 (International Mobile Telecommunication-2000) system will require the communication environment most suited to provide the mobile subscriber with a high-speed transfer of a diversity of information data services. Further, the recent developments in the technology of mobile communication systems, inter alia, mobile communication terminals or mobile telephones, e.g., such as cellular phones, PCS (Personal Communication Service) phones, or IMT-2000 terminals, are trending toward providing the capability of the various information/data services via Internet access on the mobile terminals as well as the conventional speech communications.
Of the various functions in such a mobile communication terminal, the use of Internet access is one of the more widely requested functions by mobile subscribers due to the convenience of wireless Internet access. For example, when a mobile subscriber intends to access the Internet using his or her mobile terminal, he or she will depress the Internet access shortcut key that is disposed on the mobile terminal or select a window for Internet service from a function menu displayed thereon, and then enter a desired Internet site address to establish wireless access via Internet network to retrieve any target information or data stored in one or more Internet server computers. The number of mobile subscribers using such an Internet data service with the mobile communication terminals is rapidly increasing, as the latest improvement in the technology of mobile communication allows the mobile terminals to access large amounts of data at high speeds.
Conventional mobile communication terminals are very small and compact, sized small enough to be placed on a user's palm for the sake of convenience and portability in use. In most cases mobile communication terminals have a limited number, e.g., a dozen or so, of numeric keys and/or function keys. Hence, for the purpose of entering a specified command or function into the mobile terminal from the user, a kind of multiple key assignment system is preferred, with more than one character (alphabetic) or symbol and at least one numeral being simultaneously assigned to a single key. The corresponding character or numeral is determined or identified according to the number or duration that a key is depressed (i.e., selected) by the user.
FIG. 1 shows the construction of a keypad in a conventional mobile communication terminal, on which a multiplicity of numeric keys are provided. Each numeric key is assigned multiple, e.g. three or more, alphabetical characters (or Korean phoneme characters, not shown in the drawing), in which the corresponding character or numeral is respectively selected for inputting to the mobile terminal according to the number or duration of time of depressing each specified numeric key by the user By the way, most of the addresses of Internet sites generally include several digits of characters or numerals. For example, if the user is to enter “www.” in the Internet address input mode on his mobile phone using the above keypad, then he would have to repeat a sequence of key manipulations consisting of firstly depressing a numeric key “9” for “W”, waiting a short time for the cursor to move to the right, or causing the cursor to move to the left digit using an arrow key for moving the cursor, and then again selecting the alphabetical character “w”. As a result, it would be considerably annoying and take much input time for the user to enter his desired Internet site address using a keypad configured in accordance with the prior art.